Leith Calling: AK Distillery Brings Polish Moonshine Cocktails to Scotland's First Leith Food and Drink Festival

There is a particular kind of nerves you only feel the night before you load a van. Not stage fright, not quite. Something quieter. You walk through the still house at midnight, you count the bottles one more time even though you counted them at five, and you stand for a moment in the dark with the smell of grain and copper around you, and you think, right then. Scotland.

This weekend, on 30 and 31 May 2026, AK Distillery is loading the van and heading north. We are taking our Polish moonshine, our copper jiggers, our hand numbered bottles and our entire small batch heart, and we are setting up a cocktail bar at the Leith Food and Drink Festival in Edinburgh. It is the first time the festival has come to this part of the city, and it is the first time we have ever poured for a Scottish crowd. Two firsts on the same harbour. We are properly excited, and properly nervous, and we wanted to write this down before the drive swallows the week.

Why Leith, and why now

If you have not been, Leith is the old port of Edinburgh, the bit that sits on the Firth of Forth where the city stops being a postcard and starts being a working town. Stone warehouses, salt in the air, fishing boats tied up next to converted distilleries, the kind of light that comes off water at half seven in the evening and makes you stop talking for a second. It has always been a place that fed people. Sailors, dockers, merchants, families. Food and drink in Leith is not a marketing angle. It is the whole reason the place exists.

When the festival organisers wrote to us back in February asking if we would consider coming up for the inaugural Leith Food and Drink Festival, we said yes before we had finished reading the email. A first edition of anything is special. The first market, the first tasting, the first time a community decides this is who we are, this is what we make, come and try it. To be invited to pour at that, as the only Polish moonshine distillery in the United Kingdom, felt like more than a booking. It felt like an introduction.

We make AK in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, in a small still house we built ourselves. We have served at markets across the north of England, at gin festivals in Manchester, at private weddings in the Peak District, at award ceremonies in London. But this is the first time we cross the border with a full bar. The first time we set up our cocktail station in Scotland. The first time someone in Leith can walk up, ask what bimber is, and have a glass of it pressed politely into their hand by the people who actually made it.

“A first festival in a port town is a kind of promise. We did not want to miss the chance to keep it.”

The drive north

We leave Stalybridge on Friday morning. The van will be packed the night before, every box labelled, every bottle wrapped, every cocktail mat rolled and tied. We will stop once for coffee at Tebay, because everyone stops at Tebay, and we will cross the border in the early afternoon with the radio low and the windows down. There is a stretch of the A1 just after Berwick where the road climbs slightly and the North Sea opens out on your right, and every time we have driven it as a team, somebody has gone quiet for thirty seconds. That is the moment we will know we are nearly there.

By teatime on Friday, the van will be parked behind the bar pitch on The Shore, and we will spend the evening setting up. Trestle tables. Bar runners. Glassware washed and stacked. The copper jiggers polished, because copper that has driven three hundred miles always needs a polish. Ice run sorted with a local supplier. Garnish chopped, hibiscus rehydrated, mint stripped from the stem. Then we will walk five minutes down to a pub somebody on the team has heard about, order one quiet pint each, and look at each other in that knowing way that small teams do before something they care about. Then bed. Then Saturday.

The festival, the practical bits

If you are local to Edinburgh or you are coming through that weekend, here is what you need to know. The Leith Food and Drink Festival runs Saturday 30 May and Sunday 31 May 2026, down on the waterfront at The Shore in Leith. Entry is free. You will find us at the AK Distillery bar, serving full cocktails, neat pours, and tasting flights of our six core moonshines from twelve noon until late on both days. We will have our Premium, our Hibiscus, our Roasted Hazelnut, our White Chocolate, our Peach, and our Traditional. Bottles will be available to take home, hand numbered, signed at the cap, the same way they leave the distillery every other day of the year.

We are bringing a small menu of four cocktails built for the festival. Each one uses one bottle, simple ingredients, and a finish you can actually taste on a Scottish afternoon when the wind off the Forth has its own opinions about what your face should be doing. We will publish the full recipes here on the Journal after the weekend, so if you taste something you love, the recipe will be waiting for you when you get home.

The cocktails we are pouring

We worked on the festival menu for the last three weeks, sitting around the kitchen table in Stalybridge with a notebook and a lot of ice. The brief we gave ourselves was simple. Four drinks. Each one needs to taste like the place it is being poured in. Each one needs to be ready in under ninety seconds, because a queue at a festival is not a queue, it is an apology in progress. And each one needs to make at least one person, somewhere on that quay, stop and say, what is in this.

The first is The Leith Sour. AK Hibiscus, fresh lemon, a touch of heather honey from a small Perthshire producer we found online and would happily marry, and a clean egg white foam on top. Pink as the inside of a shell, tart and floral, the kind of drink that makes a grey sky feel like a feature. It is what we want you to start with.

The second is The Shore Spritz. AK Premium over a tall glass of ice, topped with Scottish elderflower pressé and a long ribbon of cucumber. Long, dry, properly refreshing. If you are walking the waterfront with a paper plate of something hot and oily, this is the drink you want in your other hand. It is what we want you to chase a fish supper with.

The third is The Hazelnut Forth. AK Roasted Hazelnut, cold pressed coffee from a roaster in Easter Road, a half spoon of muscovado, shaken hard until your wrists ache, strained into a coupe with three coffee beans on top. A grown up after lunch drink. Dark, smooth, faintly nutty, the kind of finish that warms you from the sternum down. It is what we want you to have when the afternoon starts to lean towards evening.

The fourth is The Polish Highland. AK Peach, fresh lime, a few sprigs of mint torn by hand because torn mint always tastes better than cut mint, lengthened with cold ginger ale. This is the drink for the warm hour, for the children chasing seagulls, for the moment when someone says shall we just stay for one more. It is what we want you to end on, if you must end at all.

What a Polish moonshine is doing in Scotland

We get this question a lot, in different forms, and the answer matters to us. Bimber, the Polish word for moonshine, is the spirit of the kitchen table. It was never industrial. It was never branded. For generations, in farmhouses across Poland, people distilled grain and fruit in small copper stills for the people they loved, and they poured it in small glasses for the people who sat down at their table. AK Distillery exists because one of those traditions made it across the channel and refused to be forgotten.

Scotland understands that better than most places. This is a country that built a global spirits industry on the back of small farms quietly making something good. The whisky world here did not start with marketing departments. It started with people who knew their water, their barley, their fire. When we drive up the A1 on Friday we will not be arriving as an outsider. We will be arriving as a small distillery from one craft tradition, walking onto the quay of another, and asking if we can stand next to it for the weekend.

There is also a longer history here that we want to honour. There has been a Polish community in Scotland for the best part of a century, since the airmen and soldiers who flew with the Royal Air Force and were stationed across the country in the 1940s and quietly stayed. There are families in Edinburgh whose grandparents poured bimber at weddings in villages outside Kraków, and whose grandchildren now drink craft cocktails on Saturday nights in Leith. To bring a Polish moonshine to a Scottish festival, in 2026, is not a novelty. It is a small homecoming. We feel that, and we want to say it out loud.

The people who make this possible

There is a thing that does not always get said about small producers, and it should be said today. None of this happens without the people who keep buying the bottles. Every cap signed in our still house, every wedding we have poured at, every market we have packed up at midnight in the rain, every order shipped out from the website, all of it is the same chain. You drink our moonshine. We get to drive a van full of it up to Leith. We get to introduce a Scottish crowd to bimber. We get to come home and start the next batch.

So before we get into the weekend, thank you. To the regulars in Stalybridge who started this with us. To the people who picked up a bottle at a market in Manchester two years ago and have been quietly reordering since. To the bartenders in London and Leeds who put us on a back bar when no one had heard of us. To the readers of this Journal who send us emails about recipes and ask how we are. We mean it. None of this is taken for granted. Every glass we pour on the harbour this weekend is poured because of you.

“Two craft traditions, one harbour, one weekend. That is the whole story.”

What we are hoping for

Honestly, we are hoping for one good conversation. That is the bar we set ourselves for a festival. If one person comes up to the bar on Saturday afternoon, tries a Leith Sour, asks where the hibiscus comes from, and stays for ten minutes while we tell them about the still house, that is the whole weekend justified. The cocktails are an excuse. The bottles are an excuse. What we actually do for a living, behind the spirit, is have that conversation. About where things come from. About what slowness costs and what it gives back. About why we still bottle by hand when a machine would be cheaper.

We are also hoping the weather behaves, but we know better than to plan for that in Scotland in May. We have rain covers. We have warm coats. We have a small bottle of AK Premium under the counter that nobody will know about, for the moment the first proper gust comes off the Forth and somebody on our team needs a quiet sip and a regroup. If you see us laughing about nothing at the bar at four in the afternoon, that is probably why.

We are hoping to meet other small producers too. That is the quiet privilege of a festival like this. You spend a year alone with your craft, your stills, your suppliers, your spreadsheets, and then for two days you stand twenty feet from a baker, a cheesemaker, a coffee roaster, a chocolatier, a fishmonger, a brewer, and you swap stories at the end of the night. We are bringing a few extra bottles for exactly that. If you are pitching near us on The Shore and you read this, come and find the AK bar after close on Saturday. The kettle, metaphorically, is on.

If you are coming, come and say hello

This is the part of the article where small distilleries usually go shy and write something polite about it being lovely to see you. We are not going to be polite. We want you to come and find us. If you live in Edinburgh, Leith, Portobello, Stockbridge, Newhaven, Granton, anywhere within a bus ride of the harbour, please come down. If you are visiting Scotland that weekend, build the festival into your day. If you have never had Polish moonshine in your life, come and have your first one with the people who made it. We will remember you. That is the size we are.

Bring a friend who likes good drinks. Bring a parent who is suspicious of anything called moonshine. Bring the cousin who only ever orders gin and tonics, because we have a spritz with their name on it. Bring the colleague who keeps saying they want to go to more things. Bring yourself, on your own, with a book, and sit on the quay with a Hazelnut Forth and watch the boats. We will not interrupt.

And if you cannot make it, that is alright too. The bottles ship across the United Kingdom from our shop, and we are quietly building out our Scottish stockists over the back end of the year. If your local bar or bottle shop in Edinburgh should be carrying us, drop us a line through the contact page, tell us where, and we will go and talk to them. Word of mouth is how every small distillery grows. It is also how every small distillery survives.

A small note on serving responsibly

Because we have to say it, and because we actually mean it. Cocktails are joyful, festivals are joyful, sunshine on a harbour with a glass in your hand is one of the better things life offers. None of that works if anyone gets hurt. We will be pouring measured serves, we will be offering soft alternatives for designated drivers, and we will quietly look after anyone who needs looking after. Leith has good public transport into the city centre. The trams run from Newhaven up to St Andrew Square. Lothian Buses cover the whole waterfront. Please make a plan to get home before you order the second cocktail, not after. We would much rather see you again next year.

After the weekend

We will be back at the still house on Tuesday with sore feet, a notebook full of new ideas, and probably a few bottles fewer than we left with. We will write the second half of this story then. We will tell you which cocktail outsold the others. We will tell you the question we were asked most often. We will tell you about the people we met. We will publish the recipes from the festival menu so you can build them at your own kitchen table, the way bimber has always been meant to be built.

We will also be honest about what we learned. Every festival teaches a small producer something. The first time we did a market in Manchester, we learned that we had brought half the ice we needed and twice the small change. The first time we did a wedding, we learned that nobody, ever, in the history of weddings, has actually drunk as much sparkling wine as the venue forecasts. Leith will teach us something too. We will write that down here, plainly, in case it helps any other small distillery thinking about going on the road.

Until then, this is the long way of saying one short thing. A small Polish moonshine distillery from Stalybridge is going to Leith. We are pouring on Saturday and Sunday. The festival is free. The harbour is beautiful. The drinks are ready. Come and find us.

“We will see you on the Shore. Bring your appetite, bring your curiosity, bring someone you love.”

With love, from a still house that is about to be very quiet for forty eight hours, and from a van that is about to be very full.

AK Distillery. Polish moonshine, made in Stalybridge, poured this weekend in Leith.